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Summary of “Breakthrough Advertising” by Eugene Schwartz

Work extremely intensely, in spurts. Work hard, hard, and harder than anyone else – that is the most dominant, absolutely incontrovertible and indispensable fundamental fact. Will to win depends on the will to prepare. Failure to prepare is to prepare for failure.

When is a market born? It’s the moment when a private desire is shared by a statistically significant number of people, large enough to profitably repay selling these people.

Never “create”. Know the product to the core and combine the details in new ways. Write to the chimpanzee brain, simply, directly. You don’t have to have great ideas if you can hear great ideas. You must listen. YOu must let the ideas come to you. If you don’t let the ideas come to you, you’re going to rely too much on your own creativity. The Creativity is not in you and never mistake that now. The creativity is in your market and in your product, and all you are doing is joining the two together. Read junk, very much junk (everything in the world except your business) for an hour every day. Get all the very low stuff. Low culture makes big money. Chimpanzees evolved to man a couple hundred thousand years ago so have the chimpanzee brains first. There is your audience, there is the language, there are the words that they use. Find that hidden chimpanzee in you.

Channel demand. Never sell. Think about what your product “does”, not “is” and demonstrate this. To do this, start with a premise. Then prepare the ground for each claim; every sentence is a branch of a tree (do not work with words; rather think in terms of percentage points) Once your case is built up, demonstrate through action which takes the audience to a place of no return.